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If you enjoy cooking or appreciate good knives you will be likely to need a good knife sharpener at some point during your knife ownership. Wusthof knife sharpener guide is here to help you when it comes to the topic of knife care which is not as simple as just sharpening…

Good quality knives are a serious investment and with the right care they can last a lifetime. Part of the care of a knife is to keep it well honed and sharpened. It is important to know how to hone and sharpen a knife for two main reasons.

Safety first! A blunted knife will be more likely to snag or slip on food and cause an injury to the user. But if that wasn’t a good enough reason for you, a well kept knife will slice your food without damaging the structure and will help to preserve the appearance and in some cases the taste of the food.

This Wusthof Knife Sharpener Guide will be bringing you instructions on how and when to hone and sharpen a knife and reviews of the tools available to you.

Honing or sharpening?

The most widely understood process is probably the sharpening of a knife. We can all understand the importance of keeping the knife edge sharp. But to effectively sharpen a knife requires that the knife edge is aligned. During the lifetime of a knife – normally many years – the cutting edge will become misshapen or misaligned. This is not a defect of the knife but simply a natural result of the use of a knife – the constant friction against food and cutting surfaces will result in the deformation of the cutting edge.

This is where honing comes in. Honing is the process of realigning the knife’s metal cutting edge. If you try to sharpen a knife that has not been honed the sharpening will not be as effective and the quality of the knife will be degraded.

Honing is best performed before and after every use of a knife – after is most important. The most popular tools for honing are honing rods or honing steels. They are quite often called sharpening steels – even though technically they do not sharpen – which can lead to some confusion.

Sharpening involves removing some of the metal from the knife and needs to be carried out a lot less than honing, perhaps only once or twice a year depending on the knife’s usage.

This is a brilliant video that we found to show you how to use a sharpening steel to hone a knife and also a 2 stage knife sharpener to hone and sharpen. Check it out right now…

Why choose a Wusthof knife sharpener?

Well we love cooking and with cooking comes a lot of slicing! We appreciate quality and prefer to spend a little more money on an item that will last longer than a cheaper counterpart. So as well as being a better long term investment, it also makes the job in hand much more enjoyable.

There are many quality knives out there on the market but ever since owning our first Wusthof we have been hooked. We are pretty loyal and when we find something we like we tend to stick to it. The pure sharpness of the blades, the feel of the handle in our hands and frankly the look.

Yes ok, we are a little fickle when it comes to looks and we like the look of the Wusthof knives too.

Tools available to hone and sharpen knives

You can send your knives away for professional sharpening, but why not learn to do it at home yourself? It isn’t hard to do once you have mastered the basics and will give you ultimate control over your knives.

There are 4 types of knife sharpener tools that you can buy to help you keep your knives in the best condition possible. A brief overview of each type follows but please see individual posts for more in depth details.

1. Sharpening stones

Sharpening stones, or whetstones, are usually a rectangular block of sharpening material – typically diamond or ceramic. Because of their shape they can also be used to sharpen other metallic objects such as scissors and other blades.

An example of a stone sharpener is this Wusthof knife sharpener whetstone. It is made of a ceramic material and is two sided.

Honing rods or sharpening steels are long rod shaped tools, made out of ceramic or metal material. They are used to “hone” blades rather than sharpen them so they are used to maintain the condition of an already sharp knife rather than being used to sharpen a blunt knife.

This Wusthof knife sharpening steel has a non slip handle and is available in three different lengths.

Multi-stage knife sharpeners are manual knife sharpeners like the previous options. They combine the two functions into one – the honing function and the sharpening function. They generally have two slots for each function. Look for a decent handle grip area and a non slip base for security.

Electric knife sharpeners give you convenience and speed when it comes to knife sharpening. They have a similar footprint to the block sharpeners as above but take some of the effort out of the sharpening process. They will normally perform honing and sharpening, and are typically more expensive than the manual types of knife sharpeners.